Currently, nobody knows crap about how a lot of the damage in this game is calculated, and it is kind of annoying. However, they have acknowledged some obvious scaling/calculation issues and are going to patch them, so we are hopeful this will continue to improve.

ok from looking at the nodes, the gear and the attributes heres what my thinking is.

in my attribute page ive mostly dumped into a single thing, mostly. now the damage by about lvl50-60 is somewhere between 400-500% damage from attribute points. So I presume when u get 20% material damage on an item, 10% attack damage on a node blah blah, its basically just additive with that damage buff from attributes. Its like "increased damage" if you are up on your path of exile mechanics jargon, it all adds together and is applied to your skill in 1 hit of multiplication.

so the little % increased damage buffs of 10%, 15%, 20%, theyre really not doing much by early endgame in the face of a 400-500% increased damage base coming from your attributes.

whats gonna do a lot for you is scaling a multiplier like critical hit or scaling an extra piece of damage like ailments, or boosting the raw flat damage being fed into the chain via flat damage on gear eg 8-15 physical damage added to attacks or however its worded in this game.

now if thats a good system or not, thats up for debate, but to me it doesnt seem like a bug, more just thats how the damage all stacks up. if you want to make the most of it in its current state then ya, it would seem like taking little 10% damage nodes is fairly inefficient, the best bet is to try and move through life % nodes, cooldowns, attribute point nodes that will give you % damage but also boost something else like ailment chance, crit chance etc, resist % nodes, crit chance nodes, dodge, block, whatever it is ur doing with ur build other than simply im attacking let me go through these attack damage nodes. early game theyre probably doing work, by endgame theyre not carrying their weight.

Hey, thanks for your replies.

After a lot more tests, I finally found out that it was a bug from bleeding edge skill and the broken shield node. Actually it might not be a bug, but just very bad designed or explained.
I'll try to sum up :
if you equip a one handed weapon + a shield with very high block chance like mine, and pick up the broken shield node, your damage skyrockets, right I guess most of us know that. But the fact that I didn't know is that for the game itself, the "real" damage from the sword etc is still very small compared to the big boost you just get from the broken shield node. Adding +10%, +15% nodes boost the "real" damage from the sword, so very very small upgrades since it's trash damage compared to the "shield" damage.

But not only that, bleeding edge in the tooltip says rend damagen, even when you have a full physical weapon. Seems like there is a hidden conversion of the damage there but what's strange is that slotting frost gems for example still boost rend damage, but having frost damage on the weapon itself doesn't work really well, and what's even more strange is that when I pick the node that removes everything except material damage, it did boost my damage even on elemental based swords. I guess there is something broken in these nodes? I mean sure 30% should be converted, but test it out yourself, grab a 1h weapon with one or two elemental damage, and look at the tooltip before and after you pick the nodes.
I just doesn't change, at all, and last node actually boosts the damage even on elemental weapons.
On top of that, picking up the physical nodes close to the salvatory anchor didn't change my damage at all : no effect, even on physical based weapons, even though rend converts phys into rend damage, so i don't understand how that works atm.

Sorry for the long post, might be hard to follow what I'm trying to say :/

All nodes add up to your base damage. So once you already have a cumulative of (let's say) 500% melee/material/2-handed/etc damage, adding another 10%, will only increase your damage by 2% and not 10%.

That is why adding +dmg gems to your weapons has such a massive impact on your damage output, as they increase your base damage much more than the little addition of that '10%' material damage passive node. This also explains why (hit) attacks scale with weapons, opposed to (magic) spells.

"But not only that, bleeding edge in the tooltip says rend damagen, even when you have a full physical weapon. Seems like there is a hidden conversion of the damage there but what's strange is that slotting frost gems for example still boost rend damage, but having frost damage on the weapon itself doesn't work really well, and what's even more strange is that when I pick the node that removes everything except material damage, it did boost my damage even on elemental based swords."

I think the tooltip on this is just wrong. I think with bleeding edge you "throw" your weapon. which means your base weapon damage is converted into rend damage. This is why for example when you have a sword with fire + light . other attacks can afflict fire + light and Bleeding edge only Rend. But if you add +fire damage to a ring . Bleeding edge can also afflict fire

Your example is only relevant when you actually have a high amount of melee/material/2handed/etc damage, in my case I just had the shield node, and that's it.
I'm aware of additive and multiplicative differences, even though not really stated in game which is which, but in my case I had no or very little damage nodes if at all before the tests.

" I think with bleeding edge you "throw" your weapon. which means your base weapon damage is converted into rend damage", visually you summon an axe and make it circles around you, but it's not your weapon, and it's also not considered a projectile.

Also we are assuming a lot of things, main point is : everything is just very unclear, and we are all kind of assuming things we want to assume, but the mechanics behind the skills, and damage is unclear at best, buggy at worst.

The skill itself doesn't even tell you that you convert any type of damage into rend, but it's what it seems to be doing.

heres the thing tho, you always have a huge amount of increased damage.

you might have no % damage on your tree, but the attributes you put in every level give you % damage. On my character sheet with the char im playing atm at lvl68 ive got about 550% increased damage from attributes. So even if you dont spec any damage % on the tree or gear at all if youve put in your 10 attribute points every level youve got so much increased damage that speccing more or getting more on nodes is essentially worthless.

so the situation is that its basically worthless for anyone to get spell damage or attack damage or any sort of % damage that comes in little doses like 10% because everyone is putting in their stat points right? everyones sitting on 400%, 500%, 600%+ increased damage in endgame before they put in a single passive or put on any gear with % damage on it.

that broken shield node was what? 50% damage per 1% block? so if you had 50% block chance that was giving you 2,500% damage, so that 1 node was like taking 250 small 10% damage nodes if you had 50% block chance, and i think most blockers have significantly more than 50% block.
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that node on bleeding edge that gives some sort of damage multiplier per ailment stack thing is totally busted, thats part of the reason that skill is so much stronger than anything else, even outside of the shield node bug. i think that might be multiplicative damage, its absurd.

other skills however, when u see in their runes "10% damage" on the damage increase rune, that doesnt seem to be an internal more multiplier, when i click those the skills av damage goes up significantly less than 10%. Bleeding edge is this one skill with some super busted more multiplier rune.

the damage scaling in this game, i dont think its just bugged, its terrible in the way its done, the maths behind the way theyve done things is just not right, same with the way things are worded. i dont really get it, the devs have played path of exile, copied so much from path of exile, surely they must understand why the wording of increased and more in that game and making sure you use additive and multiplicative damage where appropriate in order to make certain things balanced and correctly impactful is so important?

the entire way the maths is working under the hood of this game needs torn out and completely rebuilt, and then it needs completely reworded in the ui so that players understand what theyre doing when theyre making choices.